
Just waiting
Until the security AI gets pwned and locks out everyone at Microsoft as threat actors. Must stock up on popcorn.
BTW this is standard arms race stuff. All fine until the opposition go bigger again.
1870 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2008
My now ex wife works in a university. They got a student records package system put in. It took quite a bit of interface design and with a BA in Maths and a BSc in CompSci she pitched in. She even did some coding for them to ensure stuff worked properly. Why it pays to have a computer savvy person around for these things.
I used to be a biomedical researcher. I have built all manner of databases in my time. So when it came to my last science job where they were getting a desktop robot to aliquot samples on plates for analysis and sensibly wanted to barcode it I built them a relational FileMaker DB which read and printed barcode labels. The techs were taking in bags of blood and processing them down to DNA and RNA in tubes.
I used the robot myself as it was more accurate at gridding than anything else. So it gridded my real time RT-PCR plates for me. It had a nice macro type interface making routine building easy even for non specialists.
Yes, Saturday morning in the charity shop. I had to log our first big delivery of Xmas cards (I know, I know). The delivery note and the delivery were at strong variance. One type of card should have had 10 packs, it had 40. Some were completely absent, others short, some like the first had extra.
I was sitting with the sheet and my phone calculator adding the columns up, I got interrupted twice, so had to start again. So many 10's and 8's. I eventually got it down in time for the end of my shift. Boxes of cards some put in any old way. It was be methodical or don't bother. Why they gave the job to me.
Oh yes some cards were three in this box, two in this one, three in that one. I was running sub totals on the sheet.
I am being punished in the new regime because I have a quick brain. I keep being put in the bot cage for liking tweets ‘too quickly’. No matter what stratagems I use to slow it down, to attempt to measure the time (highly variable) etc have come cropper of the capricious new rules. Anything seems to be the rule. I am currently in the bot cage for the fourth time today. Yesterday I spent most of the day in it from the first ‘infringement’.
The whole thing is both arbitrary and capricious. You are given no time limit for your punishment and no notification for when it has ended.
I have seen a suggestion this is actually because Musk has extended his ‘get paid only if you sue us’ attitude to office rent to paying for hosting, server farms etc. So Twitter itself is being rate limited in response.
Advertisers need to know there are fewer eyes on twitter as we are all serving time outs.
There’s a radio ham just at the tend of the road, Less than 50m away. Though if some of the trees in the park fall the right way they might wipe out at least one of his antennae. Or not. Still we can always restring the wire using the tree for the other end. A cycle driven dynamo for power or a convenient charged eCar and we’re good to go.
This sort of thing is real in NZ aka The Shaky Isles. In the Kaikoura quake coms to Kaikoura were non functional for several days. Lots of lateral and vertical uplift (up to 9m) will play havoc with the technology.
The NZ govt tells the population they may have to be self reliant for three days in a natural disaster situation. So you have an emergency bag packed with tinned & dried goods, bottled water, batteries, First Aid Kit etc. Daughter in Dunedin has one, local factory fire almost had them needing to bug out with it.
The flat roof on our extension started leaking. This uncovered two Spanish practices here in Scotland. It appears to have been a self build. First the ceiling rose fused, this caused the kitchen lights below to go too. They were connected off the ceiling rose the wiring of it was arcane.
Second was our flat roof leak leaked into next door’s extension so no proper party wall. I did of course get a new roof sharpish.
When I got repiped for the heat pump install they found the floor was boarded in odds and ends not proper floorboards. All done on a shoestring The papers for the place say the council consented the extension post facto ie after all the crimes had been covered up.
Ah yes, as a former habitué of dark microscope rooms I know what you mean. I became adept at relaxing my eyes to infinity voluntarily since there was no horizon to look at. At times I couldn’t keep the Electron Microscope room dark since I needed light to see my big photomontages of cross sections through a whole developing muscle so i could spot and label the ambiguous profiles. There were ALWAYS ambiguous profiles which had to be checked.
When the tech printed the photos in mirror image from that of the sample mental gymnastics had to be employed when navigating to the next profile. Sometimes half the montage was normal, half mirrored as a different film was used. Fun and games.
Though I became adept at seeing little clusters of myosin and act filaments in the characteristic hexagonal pattern. They look sharper than ribosomes.
As an inhabitant of a fairly new build school (2018 but add in not much use in lockdown still pretty new). I feel your pain. I’m the science technician. They saw fit to put my prep lab and the science store in the middle of the building. Now windows. Now we are just below the roof so they could have installed a couple of skylights and saved themselves electrickery bills for lighting. Except they didn’t give me a light switch either. The teachers get theirs but I cannot have darkness to test things as every movement triggers the lights. Previous tech was a numpty (polite version of the Teachers’ views) so probably never thought to have input to the spaces he was going to inhabit. Ran away without notice. He was probably SAD.
Lots of stuff indicates Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere and likely much more water. It would have been warmer but not exactly tropical. What happened on Mars was the core cooled completely so stuck in place. Our magnetic field is strong because our core is liquid and rotates at a different rate. The lack of a strong magnetic field means the solar wind is able to knock gasses out of it into space ionising them. So over time Mars lost much of it’s atmosphere and water.
Modelling suggests that much of the material which would have built a bigger Earth 2 Mars is in the asteroid belt. Jupiter started to move in to become a Hot Jupiter we see so many of in other systems. That might well have knocked the rocky planets out of orbit. It is thought the formation of Saturn pulled Jupiter back but not before it perturbed a lot of material which would otherwise have been accreted onto Mars.
So the lack of live Martians is Jupiter’s fault. But we can thank Saturn for being here at all.
Yup that was me in my first postdoc. I left 3 weeks after submitting my thesis. My examiners might, just have received their temporarily bound copies* by then. It was 2 months before I received their conclusions (no changes, no viva needed). I missed the May graduation so graduated in Absentia the following December.
Only once have I seen a deep fried mars bar on offer in a Scottish chippy. That was in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh a real tourist trap. It would also have been 20 years ago. I do recall I had the haggis supper though. I have some haggis in my fridge here in Dundee. At least half of it will be haggis pakoras sometime soon. Those should be much better known than the chocolate bar thing. Haggis pakoras are the foods of the gods.
It is expensive only if you buy it new. It is well made stuff so decent second hand kit is available. I’m typing this on a used MacBook Pro. I have recently bought a reconditioned iPhone from eBay for less than £200. It plays better with the laptop than my Android and when I finish transferring stuff from the Android I will log out of my Google account with a happy feeling. They have become Evil.
As a school science tech with the fixit bent I fix things for our companion primary. I have been presented with a succession of laptop power cables with the lead to the computer being frayed in the same place every time. Some to bare wires I have to individually wrap with insulation tape before the outer layer goes on.
Next time I’m over taking stuff back curiosity will get the better of me. Does EVERYONE trap the power cord under their machines? Or are the kids over toothsome?
Because the Scottish banks never misbehaved they never lost the ability to issue their own scrip. We currently have three sets of notes plus BoE notes. The three Scots trading banks must hold securities to cover each £ of scrip they produce. Since the supply of notes is pretty much a constant this is quite easy.
In various high security facilities in Southern England those physical securities include such notes, promissory notes and actual precious substances.
After Independence we could part capitalise our Central Bank by letting them continue to issue notes but hold electronic deposits in the Central Bank’s accounts instead of physical securities. Ideally in foreign currencies.
I work as a school science tech. I was given a multimeter by Chemistry to get working. Someone had pressed the Hold button. That it was holding was displayed on the screen. I checked the battery and contacts while I was at it mind.
Had a light gate control box which wasn’t recognising the light gates. Nowt wrong with the gate or the cable. The input socket contacts were dodgy mind. Cleaned them with magic spray and problem solved.
The amount of crud you find in things in schools has to be seen to be believed.
It seems to me she was a true believer in the technology. There are stories of her berating lab workers to work harder to make the technology work. The fraud was playing for time until the technology started to work which she seemed to believe it would if the scientists just worked harder.
I don’t see much of the principle of caveat emptor here. The investors need to emply some scientific advisors who know their onions before laving large amounts of moolah on startups like this. The basic idea is not impossible. I just think the sensitivity of the detection tech is not there yet.
If you have had a blood test lately you will see the size of the tubes filled. That is not just a finger drop of blood.
I recently had a lumbar puncture, a needle was inserted under the membranes to sample the CSF. I’m awaiting news of the results 6 weeks later. Some things still take time.
I’m in Dundee and the nearest one is South of Edinburgh requiring engagement with the dreaded Bypass. But you can order some stuff online now. So let joy be unconfined. Especially since I require no more furniture. Some of it is Ikea but with careful use it is still fine. Also bought long enough ago that it was actually solid stuff.
Same with science journal papers which were the first big use of pdfs. Just like a section from the journal without having to pay for a colour photocopier. We basically almost completely stopped going to the library.
Used to be a weekly pilgrimage to go through the dead tree journals and badly photocopy the papers you wanted. With pdfs that was no more. A JANET connection meant data was not an issue as well. It was sweet.
The blood type on blood donation bags is still written in marker pen by hand. Because in a disaster situation the scanners might run out of battery and not be able to be recharged. Why despite modern auto blood pressure machines med students are still taught the old way with a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer. I have taught med students how to do that. Including the cheat for a noisy environment, like a large teaching lab.
During my PhD in the early ‘90s I had three boxes of 3.5” 1.5MB floppies with my thesis and data on. One was the working one, one lived in my bag and was backed up from working end of every day. The third lived at home. it came in for updating weekly.
This was in NZ AKA the Shaky Isles. I had no access to the server for file storage, just for email. Files were Mac anyway, I wrote in WriteNow smaller and faster than Word. It worked with Pro Cite my references database. I hate Endnote which replaced it. Pro Cite was a proper database End Note is nothing of the sort.
Which is why here in Yurp we are putting most of the new wind turbines out at sea, sometimes way out at sea where winds are more reliable. Here in Scotland we have quite a few pumped storage installations now. Some built in from the start such as the Hole in the Mountain at the north end of Loch Awe, some retrofitted.
Whether a hydro station is pumped storage or not does not affect it’s spin up time.